What most companies do to build a brand new partner channel is to contact and pitch dozens of partners and restrict their time investment based on results. To focus on a few effective partners.

Here are 3 tips to avoid losing time and focus straight to the partners who will really provide value :

1. Select the partners your product help them close deals

2. Check their real capacity to address the market

3. Good partners are people, not companies.

Please let me explain these 3 tips.

 

1. Select the partners your product help them close deals

Partners always need key differentiators to sell their own products. Select the partners to whom your product offers immediate capability for their sales representatives to close their own deals. Usually, the sales reps have a strong incentive on the corporate products, plus a bonus on partner sales. But the majority of their pay depends on internal sales. So even if you offer a scandalous margin on your own products, this will always be a secondary objective to them.

Thus your product does not have only to generate additional revenues. If you want your channel to work, your product has to help them close their core deals. Don’t be an add-on, a good-to-have complementary product. This rarely works. Select your partners depending on your capacity to help them sell more of their products.

 

2. Check their real capacity to address the market

Do your background check. Don’t give too much trust in brand and market rumors. Good partners are the ones where the sales team has a real access to your target prospects. Social networks are great to address this issue. If your target market is marketing managers in the high-tech industry, evaluate your potential partners on this : how many connections sales reps already have with your targets ? You can check this on LinkedIn.

With this approach, you can even push your partner to introduce you with the targets they already know.

 

3. Good partners are people, not companies.

This is the major mistake we all do when starting to build a channel. If you focus on companies, you select the ones that you consider will provide with the greatest impact on the market. If you are not that bad, it is not that difficult to be listed as a partner. Even with large companies.

But don’t expect sales to explode immediatly. In most cases, the deal has been easy because your product will be just one additional line in their looooong list of partner products. It doesn’t cost them much to sign a partnership agreement. At this point we are very far from an effective prospecting.

With such a low commitment from your partner, you will be forced to heavily invest in lead generation (on its behalf) to demonstrate your value in the partnership. Basically, you will bring them deals on a plate (which is not what you expected at first, right ?).

At this point of failure in the partnership, another common approach is to address and pitch sales reps individually. Then you have a direct impact on the very people who will make the deal work on the field. You have lost time in discussing with the management.

Make yourself a favor : gain time in dealing with people. Instead of addressing companies, find out individuals, pitch your product, build trust, bring the heat. Prefer 10 strongly committed individual partners than 100 non-committed sales reps you never met.

After tons of discussions with successful entrepreneurs, we came to these brick-and-mortar conclusions.

IKO System has implemented several algorithms to do this job of selecting the best partners for you. We do this in 3 steps :

1. We automatically define you ecosystem and your sales tactics : the position/seniority of your preferred decision makers, and the geography/industry/size of your target clients.
2. We analyze your whole network and even more (up to your level-3 connections -from different sources including LinkedIn and Facebook-). This means millions of inter-connected people. And for each of these contacts, we isolate the ones who match your targets (in position/company).
3. Then we spot the people in your network (#1 or #2) who offer the best reach to your audience.